The
Comfort Women : Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second
World Warby George L. Hicks
One of the ravages of war has always been rape, but in the 1930s and
'40s the Imperial Japanese Forces made it systematic, forcing thousands
of women into sexual slavery for their soldiers at highly organized "comfort
stations." Drawn mostly from Korea (which was then ruled by Japan), the
"comfort women" who tell their horrific stories in this book were shipped
to the front lines and all over the war zones, often arriving in the same
shipments with munitions and food. Like those staples, their sexual services
were intended to keep an army working and alive; a common superstition
among the troops was the belief that sex before battle could magically
ward off injury. This searing, painful chapter in history was uncovered
in part by a Japanese journalist, who came across photos of the women in
classified documents. --Francesca Coltrera
Paperback - 303 pages Reprint edition W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393316947

Comfort
Women : Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War IIby Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Suzanne O'Brien (Translator)
This is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the
Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally
responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these
atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women,
who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military,
first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit
in a Toyko District Court stating that they had been forced into sexual
servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and
their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense
activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How
large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in
setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if
any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the
current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching
and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese
ways of remembering the war. Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation
and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many
as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian,
and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage
in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women
were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government
has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system
nor given compensation directly to former comfort women.
Hardcover - 240 pages 0 edition (January 15, )Columbia Univ Pr; ISBN: 023112032X

The
Rape of Nanking : The Forgotten Holocaust of World War IIIris Chang, Foreword by William C. Kirby
China has endured much hardship in its history, as Iris Chang shows
in her ably researched The Rape of Nanking, a book that recounts the horrible
events in that eastern Chinese city under Japanese occupation in the late
1930s. Nanking, she writes, served as a kind of laboratory in which Japanese
soldiers were taught to slaughter unarmed, unresisting civilians, as they
would later do throughout Asia. Likening their victims to insects and animals,
the Japanese commanders orchestrated a campaign in which several hundred
thousand--no one is sure just how many--Chinese soldiers and noncombatants
alike were killed. Chang turns up an unlikely hero in German businessman
John Rabe, a devoted member of the Nazi party who importuned Adolf Hitler
to intervene and stop the slaughter, and who personally saved the lives
of countless residents of Nanking. She also suggests that the Japanese
government pay reparations and apologize for its army's horrific acts of
60 years ago. Amazon.comPaperback - 290 pages (November )Penguin USA(Paper); ISBN: 0140277447

The
Good Man of Nanking : The Diaries of John RabeJohn Rabe, et al
Like Oskar Schindler of Schindler's List, John Rabe was an enterprising
and fundamentally decent German businessman caught up in war. Head of the
Nanjing branch of Siemens, the German electronics firm, he had lived and
worked in China for almost 30 years. Rather than flee from the threatened
city, he stayed to organize a safety zone as refuge of last resort for
Chinese civilians. The Good Man of Nanking is his firsthand description
of the terrible events and his ultimate success in saving perhaps a quarter
of a million lives. The diary format provides a forum for the extraordinary
power and immediacy of John Rabe's words, including his gallows humor,
placing the reader there in Nanking as the bombs explode and the Japanese
soldiers begin their massacres. Rabe's trials were not over when he returned
to wartime Germany; diary entries that he wrote during the occupation of
Berlin by the Soviet army form a fascinating coda to this book. --John
Stevenson, Amazon.comPaperback - 320 pages (March 14, )Vintage Books; ISBN: 0375701974

Hidden
Horrors : Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Transitions--Asia and Asian America)
by Yuki Tanaka
HIDDEN HORRORS reveals for the first time Japanese atrocities during
World War II, including cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of POWs;
and the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants.
"As sobering and thought-provoking a book as one could read on the
subject". - THE JAPAN TIMES.
Paperback - 296 pages Westview Pr (Trd Pap); ISBN: 0813327180

Sugamo Prison, Tokyo : An Account of the Trial and Sentencing of
Japanese War Criminals in 1948, by a U.S. Participantby John L. Ginn
(Hardcover - November 1992)ASIN/0899507395
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The war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo meted out the Allies' official
justice; Lord Russell of Liverpool's sensational bestselling books on the
Axis' war crimes decided the public's opinion. The Knights of Bushido,
Russell's shocking account of Japanese brutality in the Pacific in World
War II, describes how the noble founding principles of the Empire of Japan
were perverted by the military into a systematic campaign of torture, murder,
starvation, rape, and destruction. Notorious incidents like the Nanking
Massacre and the Bataan Death March emerge as merely part of a pattern
of human rights abuses. Undoubtedly formidable soldiers, the Japanese were
terrible conquerors. Their conduct in the Pacific is a harrowing example
of the doctrine of mutual destruction carried to the extreme, and begs
the question of what is acceptable—and unacceptable—in total war. 37 black-and-white
illustrations
(Publication Date: August 17, 2008)

The Japanese on Trial : Allied War Crimes Operations in the East,
1945-1951by Philip R. Piccigallo
(Hardcover - February 1980)
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